People mean well. From Plymouth to Southend, Tom Daley is greeted in the
streets as if there is shiny gold bauble already hanging round his neck.

“If anyone comes up to you, they’re just like 'oh yeah, bring home the gold, go and do it, go and grab it! Bring it back!’ just as if it’s the easiest thing,” he mused here in the Olympic Park.

“They automatically assume that you’re just going to walk into the pool and come back out with a gold medal. And any athlete will tell you that it’s actually not that easy.”

Poor old Tom. As he outlined just how suffocating the expectation is, so oppressive indeed that preparing at the Southend seaside with the rest of the diving team has felt like his great escape from the Stratford Village cauldron, you could glean just how mad it must be to be the poster boy of an entire Games.

He is an 18 year-old in a sport quite dominated by one nation and is up against a diver so consistently excellent that even he compares China’s Qiu Bo to a “robot”. Yet still people seem convinced he is a gold medal banker.

Mind, as he talked enthusiastically about having the time of his young life, you were reminded that this is the kid who has been living with this sort of pressure since he was a wide-eyed 14 year-old walking into the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing.

He has grown up in the unforgiving public glare, been bullied at school, criticised for supposed under-achievement and not working hard enough and he has endured it all while watching his father dying. Pressure? What’s pressure?

“Pressure isn’t a bad thing,” he shrugged. “I quite like it; divers either handle it or they don’t. Pressure should bring out the best in you because you have that extra adrenalin rush.”

When Daley clambers atop the 10 metre platform with his partner Peter Waterfield on Monday in the synchro event, that adrenalin will be fuelled by high emotion.

Daley does not deny that the idea of making a fantastic Olympic splash for his late father Rob, who died in May last year after a long battle with cancer, will accompany him.

“It’s always there in the back of your head and it would be extra special if I could do well at these Games,” he said, talking of his delight at how mum Debbie and his two younger brothers would be in the Aquatics Centre to cheer him on. “It’s obviously been a very tough year.”

With Daley, we can be assured the focus will be complete. He has become such a steely performer that, while sitting next to the boy wonder that he had criticised so publicly earlier in the year, even British diving performance director Alexei Evangulov was moved to pay tribute.

The Russian was so unimpressed in the Spring by how Daley was seemingly taking on too many commercial commitments out of the pool that he felt the need to compare him to Anna Kournikova; now he evidently saw Daley more as a Serena Williams.

“Tom possesses great personality but if you have only personality it is not enough to be a great athlete. You have to work hard, and he actually works very hard. But I am a greedy coach and I always need more! So Tom has competed greatly over the last couple of months.”

Love and peace has broken out. Daley praised Evangulov for changing the culture of British diving.

“Oh, thank you,” beamed the Russian, who was perhaps being blinded at the time by the golden ring, in the shape of the five Olympic rings, that Daley was sporting.

A star can get away with that but it is also easy to forget what a hardened athlete he has become, one with the confidence to wonder aloud if Bo, unbeaten in individual events for two years , is really fireproof.

Noting how he has beaten Bo in the World Championships in 2009 and on three other occasions, he added pointedly: “You never know what can happen in the Olympic Games.

"Qiu Bo hasn’t done an Olympics before. If you constantly put pressure on the Chinese, they’re more likely to falter.”

Daley fancies he has equal chances of a medal in both the individual and synchro events. His working relationship with the veteran former silver medallist Waterfield, as they laughed about their 13-year age gap, suggests there will be absolutely no repeat of his fallout with Blake Aldridge four years ago.

Because Tom Daley has grown up. Waterfield looked at the kid who is closer to his son’s age (11) than his own, at the boy whose smile beams down from a thousand billboards and smiled about the Daley effect.